1 - What makes you write this book, being a technical guy writing a non-technical book (of course involving technical people) ?

2 - What are the key areas the book addresses?, ( i.e: how each people approach their coding (in technical point of view or in general))

3 - Does the book address the experience/type of work done by the interviewees?

Thanks in advance,

To take those in order:

1. I'm not just a technical guy. I'm actually a was-gonna-be-a journalist who got sidetracked into the software world. I think Apress asked me to do this book because I was technical enough to do good interviews with these folks but also knew something about interviewing and editing. (Though I realized late in working on the book that perhaps the best preparation I had for doing this book was my high-school years of wanting to be a musician: my incessant reading of interviews in magazines like Modern Drummer probably burned the form into my brain at some deep level.)

2. Mostly I tried to get folks to talk about how they learned to program, both when they were starting out and over the course of their career, how they actually work now, and what they think about the current state and near future of programming. I was also interested in how the conceived of programming--what other intellectual disciplines is it like--and how they thought it fit into the world--should everybody learn to program or will it always be a specialized craft.

3. Certainly I talked with all of them about their history so readers should be able to understand where they're coming from.